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Saturday, June 23, 2012

My really late Toycon Day 1 Report

WARNING PIC HEAVY

The annual Toycon started on a Friday, and to make it interesting for me, it became my first time to be there as a seller instead of a buyer (well, most of time anyways). So along with my wife, we were selling our shirts under the brand Chesto featuring my parody and mash-up designs popular pop-culture elements.

In the meantime, visit our Chesto Facebook page to make this shameless product placement a wee bit worthwhile. :P

As expected, since this wasn't the weekend, this was considered the soft opening for the event. Even on a weekday there were a very decent amount of visitors and by 4pm the halls were already full of people (but not full enough to get rid of your oxygen supply-- that im expecting this weekend to happen!). We were able to sell a decent amount of shirts that day and were hoping to get more buyers this weekend. Best seller that day was one of the Nippon Humor shirts, particularly the Robotorso.

But as usual, it wont be any less meaningful if I attended a Toycon without checking out the toys. Fortunately we were located right beside The Toy Stash booth, which to my surprise was part-owned by Flux, boyfriend of my former classmate in UP Fine Arts, Hiyas. So he graciously gave me free reign over one of his toy boxes and I scrounged for unusual collectibles, and I was not disappointed.

4 inches high die-cast with flamer and static pilot figure!

The helmet opens to reveal pilot. You can remove the head to reveal an empty suit.

Either Alex Murphy had major revamps on his hardware, or Darth Vader decided his old suit sucks.

I was very surprised of my find. I recognized this immediately when I saw its dark drab olive color. And I only saw a picture of the toy in a New Type magazine back in 2004. Its the Power Suit of Starship Troopers. Yes, the one Robert Heinlein wrote and made into a B-movie starring that Guy-who-met-your-mother. After the movie was launched, Japan decided to create a short lived anime that included this design (Although it was never animated/revealed, methinks) but ended up in the Revoltech series. Flux seemed impressed how I was able to identify it immediately and even offered me the static orange figure that went with it.

Later I found this little cute gem of a toy, unusual because of the subject: a marble-spitting SD Godzilla. XD

2 inch high plastic of awesomeness!

I love this guy's gaping expression and the marble that went with it was subtle enough to make it compliment the toy as a whole. I showed this to my wife Jewel and promptly displayed it on our booth desk like a Maneki-Neko or Japanese Fortune Cat. Its actually a cute homage considering Godzilla's design was indeed part cat due to its small almost indistinguishable ears.

Later that day I decided to dig in Flux's box and saw this most unusual thing that I couldnt believe was in the box. It was so obscure that I had no idea where it came from, but I suspect it to be North American in origin as the attempt to make an anime-esque style seemed to fall into the Strange Zone.

Yes, she came with the stand, and a pair of panties.

The last one was the kind of impulse purchase as I never really came across something so, well, it was just like sitting there with no one batting an eye to her direction due to her unusual circumstances. So despite what my wife initially thought of my motives, I bought it anyway and took her home with a plan in mind.

The whole bunch didnt fall beyond P400, believe it or not, so I was still within my promised budget of P500 a day collecting toys that are strange enough to be worth keeping.

My overall thoughts on the Toycon event itself is that its considered a "slow" day since its the weekday, but it was the last weekday of the salary week that enough con goers passed by to buy enough shirts to pay off the rent. :D